We’ve previously noted that Stitcher Radio is one of 8 great apps for listening to podcasts on the move, letting you tap-in to your favorite online radio shows on demand, encompassing tens of thousands of live stations.

And with its latest update for Android, you’ll now be able to download and make any podcast available for offline listening.

While Stitcher for Android already had an offline mode, it only applied to newer episodes – there was no way of going back through the archives of your favorite podcasts and pushing them offline. As you can see from the ‘before and after’ shots below, the options for each episode have changed from ‘Episode Details’ to ‘Add to Listen Later’.

Now, unless a station has specifically implemented limitations on how far you can browse its archives, you can go all the way back in time and add anything to an offline playlist.

Once you’ve added your desired tracks, head to the main menu and open the ‘Listen Later’ folder, which you’ll have to push to offline mode, and your podcasts will start download. Of course, it goes without saying you’ll need to ensure you have adequate space on your device – so don’t go too crazy with the ‘Listen Later’ function.

This is a big move for Stitcher, as it makes it infinitely more appealing to commuters, travelers or anyone who needs offline access to their podcasts.

While the iOS incarnation does have offline mode too, it only lets you browse back a small number of podcasts, not the entire archives.

Finnish startup Jolla, which launched its first smartphone with a new Sailfish mobile operating system last year, announced today that its OS is now ready for global distribution after reaching release 1.0. Sailfish will also soon be available for download on Android devices.

The first batch of Jolla phones landed in Europe with Finnish mobile network operator DNA in late November last year. Availability has been limited, with all devices running a beta version of Sailfish. Since then, Jolla has released three significant software updates. A fourth one is due in early March, after which Sailfish OS will make its way worldwide.

With the software ironed out for commercial release, Jolla smartphones will also start going on sale in more places. The company says it is now “rapidly entering into new markets and is negotiating with partners in several countries” — which include Russia, India and Hong Kong. Online sales will open in these three countries “in the near future,” Jolla says.

Currently, Jolla smartphones are only available for online orders in parts of Europe.

In September last year, Jolla revealed that its Sailfish OS would be compatible with the Android ecosystem in terms of apps, as well as hardware. Today Jolla announced that Sailfish OS will be made available as downloadable software to selected devices running Android OS — with the Sailfish community having ported the OS into major versions of Samsung’s Galaxy smartphone, Google Nexus and Sony Xperia.

The Sailfish community is also in the midst of porting for popular Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi’s products.

Jolla will release the downloadable Sailfish OS software in phases during the first half of this year. First, it will release a UI launcher Android app for users to start experiencing the Sailfish user interface in their existing devices running Android OS. The app will be available for download in the “near future.” Some time later, the full Sailfish OS will be made available for Android devices.

Jolla believes that Sailfish’s compatibility with the Android ecosystem is not an irony for an operating system that is meant to be an alternative to the current status quo — instead it is tapping on existing products to make it easier for vendors to switch over. Antti Saarnio, chairman of Jolla’s board, says:

We see this as a huge volume opportunity for Sailfish OS as there are close to a billion Android users globally. Many of them are looking for new user experiences to freshen up their existing devices. Last year in China alone, about 100 million devices were re-flashed after the purchase with a new operating system. This approach allows Sailfish OS to scale into volume fast without limitations. This is a scaling opportunity in a similar way as we have seen in the mobile gaming industry recently.

The company also notes that the “availability and interoperability of Android apps in Sailfish OS has increased greatly since the sales start.”

Marc Dillon, the co-founder and chief operating officer of Jolla, says that customers are now able to install their preferred Android app stores to gain access to Android apps. Amid earlier concerns that Android compatibility could make developers less inclined to go native, Dillon notes that the Sailfish OS community has “already developed major social media applications, such as Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, and Foursquare, natively to the Sailfish OS.”

To scale up its handset business, Jolla has also formed a few new partnerships — namely with Angry Birds developer Rovio, F-Secure and Tieto Corporation. With F-Secure in particular, Jolla customers will receive an undisclosed amount of free cloud storage integrated with their devices.

Jolla was founded by a group of ex-Nokia employees who strongly believed that MeeGo deserved a second chance. Subsequently, it released its first smartphone with a new take on the forgotten platform, called Sailfish OS.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that Google tried unsuccessfully to buy messaging app WhatsApp before Facebook struck a $19 billion deal. Fortune initially reported that the company had made a $10 billion offer, but a later report from The Information cites sources claiming that Google offered to exceed Facebook’s offer, but to no avail.

WhatsApp is attractive to both tech giants because it offers something that neither currently posses: a mobile-only service with significant traction across the world. With over 450 million active users each month, WhatsApp is also more popular than Facebook and other social networks in countries.

Google has a strong presence on mobile, thanks to bundled service on Android, Google Now, and Hangouts — an app that pairs its Talk service with the video-chat feature from Google+ — yet still it made a play for WhatsApp.

As people spend more time on mobile, the Internet’s biggest players are seeking ways to maintain their dominant positions. Given that messaging has emerged as the killer app for mobile, it is little wonder that they want to own a slice of the pie too. Google search and services rule on the desktop, but mobile is a different game and the company needs ways to the billions who are starting to come online from mobile devices for the first time.

So, what are Google’s options now?

Another acquisition

The biggest problem for Google right now is that it has no alternative acquisition after missing out on WhatsApp. No service or application comes close to the app’s user base, both in terms of the sheer number of registrations and its broad spread across Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America. As we wrote when assessing the competition yesterday, another billion dollar messaging deal is unlikely for some time.

That said, one possible strategic fit for Google may be Kik, the Canada-based messaging app that has flown under Silicon Valley’s radar in a similar way to WhatsApp.

Super-charge Hangouts

Google has already relaxed Android settings to enable users to replace the central SMS system with Hangouts, but it could super-charge Hangouts with more new features. Perhaps Google may consider a Kik-like browser, tighter synergies between its mobile apps and Hangouts, or the addition of games, stickers and other services that are proving popular in Asia with the likes of Line and WeChat.

Beyond features, relationships with operators are a key way to gain distribution worldwide. As WhatsApp did, Google could cut deals with operators to offer all-you-can-eat Hangouts data messaging. The limitation here is that Hangouts is only available for iOS and Android devices. While those two platforms represent most of the market in the West, mobile adoption is still growing at a slower pace in the emerging world — platforms like BlackBerry and Nokia’s now-defunct Symbian platform remain popular in parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The Hangouts user experience is basic enough, so starting a new ‘WhatsApp-inspired’ app from scratch doesn’t make sense, even for a company with the high-profile consumer brand and industry connections of Google.

Nothing

The final alternative, of course, is that Google does nothing. That could be a viable strategy if WhatsApp was a one-off deal that it was eager to claim ahead of Facebook, rather than a move that realized a long-standing ambition of buying a messaging app.

As we explained, WhatsApp’s position in a fragmented world of chat apps is unique, and Google’s keenness may well have been motivated by a desire to keep it away from Facebook. Unlike Google, Facebook is relatively marooned on mobile: it has no hardware to cling on to, and its biggest home-made mobile push — its Home Android launcher — has been a flop.

Google is actually already benefiting from the growth in mobile messaging, albeit as a relative spectator. Chat app platforms — like Line, Kakao Talk and WeChat — are making hundreds of millions of dollars from connected games and virtual products, a vast proportion of which are on Android devices in Asia — giving Google a tidy cut of app store sales. The trend has the potential to break into other markets, as the ambitious Asian messaging firms plot global expansions.

We reached out to Google for comment but, as you might expect, the company declined to provide any details on its plans for mobile messaging.

Many people think that free language learning platform competes against other educational language services, Many people might assume free language learning platform Duolingo competes with other educational services, but the company that its co-founder names as a key competitor may surprise you. It’s Candy Crush.

Duolingo co-founder Luis von Ahn tells TNW in an interview that the company views games as its competitors, simply because they occupy time that users spend on mobile.

When we ask people why is it that you’re learning a language on Duolingo, we were expecting the most common answer to be something like: I’ve always wanted to learn a language or something like that, but the most common answer is because it’s fun, and at least I’m not wasting my time.

So we’re eating into gaming time, not eating into study time. It’s people that are procrastinating, but instead of playing Candy Crush, they’re getting something useful out of it. That’s like the most common user.

This also explains why late last year, Duolingo updated its iOS app to introduce a gamified virtual store. The store lets users purchase virtual items to customize their experience with a virtual currency called “Lingots,” which users can earn by achieving certain milestones in Duolingo. Von Ahn tells us that this gaming element was to make Duolingo more of a fun thing.

The way that Duolingo is going about gamifying language-learning will no doubt be a boost for the next region it intends to target: Asia.

After all, mobile games in Asia — in particular China — are hugely popular. A recent report released by state-affiliated research organization China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) showed a 54.5 percent growth in the number of users playing mobile games to reach 215 million as of end-2013, up 75.9 million from the end of 2012. Even messaging apps in Asia have taken to adding games to their platforms to hook in users.

Duolingo’s positioning as a fun app with the addition of gaming elements, beyond its core use of learning new languages, will no doubt be a boost for its standing in Asia.

Furthermore, a recent funding round raised by Duolingo will also aid its move into the region. The company closed a $20 million round led by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers earlier this week. Von Ahn says:

In Asia we’re not as big because we don’t support any of the Asian languages, but that’s one thing we’re definitely going to be doing over the next few months or so. In fact, part of this investment is to really penetrate Asia more, because right now we just don’t have support for Asian languages. We have not entered Asia almost at all. We do have some users, but compared to the Americas and Europe, it’s very small.

Right now, the regions where Duolingo sees its highest traffic are the Americas and Europe. A quarter of its traffic comes from the US, while Brazil takes second spot with 15 percent of the traffic, and the third is Mexico.

To move into Asia, von Ahn tells us that the first step is to simply offer the product first — which means courses that let students learn English from Asian languages including Chinese, Japanese and Korean. He says that these courses will be up in the “next few months” with Japanese ready in about a month.

The courses are being created by the Duolingo community. This stems from a crowdsourcing program the company announced in October last year – called the Language Incubator, which lets native speakers and language enthusiasts create courses that an algorithm will subsequently ensure are in line with Duolingo’s standards.

Von Ahn notes that these course creators don’t tend to be from Asia, given the small number of users Duolingo currently counts from the continent, but are more likely US citizens who were originally from Asia.

Von Ahn admits that Duolingo is considering its first ever marketing campaign once the course land on the service, but the company will see how things go first:

So far we’ve never had to do any type of marketing in any country that we enter — for example we just started learning English from Russian and it’s growing by itself without us having to do any marketing. We already have about 150,000 users in Russia without us doing any marketing; it just grows by itself. So we’re hoping that the same will happen in Asia, but we don’t know.

Other than its Asia plans, Von Ahn reveals that Duolingo is also planning to beef up its current platform with two major features: certification and group learning.

Duolingo is going to start certifying that their users have successfully mastered a language, which can then be submitted to employers or universities. Von Ahn notes that Duolingo has received a lot of requests for this, especially in emerging markets, as current tests tend to be expensive and people need to make an appointment in advance and travel down to testing centers to take them.

“We’re going to have a test as well, but it’s a test that you can take from your phone or on the Web, so you can take it at home, you can take it anytime — and it’s going to cost $20, not $250,” Von Ahn says, referring to the fact that the TOEFL test can cost up to $250 — which “may be a month’s salary” for some people in emerging markets.

“We think we can do a good job with certification… we think it’s quite unfair that these tests are so expensive because it costs like $10 to administer a test, it does not cost $200,” Von Ahn tells us.

To push general acceptance of its certification, Duolingo has come up with a study that shows people who take its tests have scores that are highly correlated with scores of the other tests. Von Ahn says that once enough people start taking the test, because it’s more convenient and cheaper, he hopes that they will start pressuring employers and universities to accept the Duolingo certificates. On top of that, Duolingo is launching these tests and in turn, certifications, with a few launch partners.

The certification feature will come some time later this year, but what will arrive first on Duolingo is a groups feature, according to Von Ahn.

Right now on Duolingo, people essentially learn individually. However, there have been many requests, especially from teachers, who want an easy way to keep track of all their students in a classroom. Duolingo estimates that there are tens of thousands of school-going children using its platform.

“So we’re going to have a groups feature, where the idea is that anyone can make a group of learners, and the leader of the group can always see the progress of everybody else, so you can think of it as like a teacher. But it doesn’t have to be a classroom, it can be any type of group,” Von Ahn says. Groups will have a leaderboard and a message board, with the idea to get them to learn together competitively. It will land on Duolingo “relatively soon.”

With these new value-added features, as well as the gaming element, Duolingo looks set to appeal to a wide swathe of users in Asia who are keen to learn English. However, whether it can stand out amidst the competition — after all, there are already online learning platforms that users in Asia rely on, and Duolingo has to appeal enough for them to switch. The fact that it’s a free app though, will no doubt be a boon for it too.